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MONTREAL - Luka Magnotta was dressed head-to-toe in white and showed no emotion Friday when a judge ruled he would stand trial on first-degree murder in the death of Concordia University student Lin Jun.

His lawyer, Luc Leclair, had argued during the preliminary hearing — in which much of the evidence is presented but under a publication ban — that his client should only be committed to trial on the lesser charge of second-degree murder.

A date for the trial, which will be held sometime next year before a judge and jury, will be set April 29.

Quebec Court Judge Lori-Renée Weitzman made her ruling after hearing and seeing much of the evidence in the preliminary hearing, which began March 11 and ended Friday, after 11 days in court.

"We're very happy," crown prosecutor Louis Bouthillier told reporters after the ruling. "There was a lot of hard work done by the investigators and there's still a lot of work to be done."

Magnotta, 30, faces four other charges including causing an indignity to a body, producing and distributing obscene material, sending obscene material through the postal system and harassing Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other members of Parliament.

Leclair argued the murder charge should only be second-degree because there wasn't enough evidence showing the killing was deliberate and planned — both elements must be proven in order for a jury to convict on first-degree.

A publication ban — a normal order in a preliminary inquiry — prevents the media from reporting on evidence presented at the hearing.

Throughout the inquiry, Bouthillier presented his evidence, which included testimony from 32 witnesses, including a pathologist, toxicologist, police officers and postal workers and Weitzman had to decide whether there was enough proof to send the case to trial, and if so, on what charge.

The prosecutor argued there was enough evidence for Magnotta to be tried on first-degree murder, which carries an automatic life sentence with no chance for parole for 25 years. A conviction on second-degree murder also means a life sentence but parole eligibility starts after 10 years.

Magnotta was arrested in June in an Internet café in Berlin after an international manhunt. Lin, an engineering and computer science student and Chinese national who came to Canada in 2010, was murdered and dismembered May 25.

His father attended only a few days of the preliminary hearing, often breaking down in sobs.

At one point during the second week of the inquiry, Magnotta collapsed in the glassed-in prisoner's box and the hearing was suspended for the day. Leclair said at the time that his client wasn't well and needed medication.

Ontario court documents released earlier this month say Magnotta was declared to be a paranoid schizophrenic when he was a teenager but didn't always take his prescribed medication to manage the illness.

Magnotta, who was going by his given name of Eric Newman at the time, pleaded guilty in 2005 to four charges of defrauding a woman - a 21-year-old with the mental capacity of an 8-to 10-year-old - he met online. At the time of sentencing, Magnotta's lawyer presented a letter to the judge from the Toronto-area Rouge Valley Health Services detailing Magnotta's mental health diagnosis.

The letter, signed by psychiatrist Thuraisarny Sooriabalan, says that since 2000, when the disease was diagnosed, Magnotta had been admitted to various hospitals, including two admissions in 2003 to the Rouge Valley Health Services.

He was prescribed antipsychotics, a sedative to help him sleep and anti-anxiety medication, but often missed taking them because he was "not very regular in attending the outpatient department," says the letter, dated May 30, 2005.

If he did not take his medication as prescribed, Magnotta "would be prone to relapse of his symptoms, which include paranoia, auditory hallucinations, fear of the unknown, etc.," Sooriabalan wrote.

The judge in 2005 ordered that Magnotta get treatment and/or counselling for mental health issues and that he perform 20 hours of community service during his nine-month conditional sentence and one-year probation period.

"For those not immediately affected, this was just one of many thousands of routine criminal cases in provincial court; it came and went," Ontario Court Justice Fergus O'Donnell wrote in his decision this month to release the letter to the media. "Fast forward almost a decade and all's changed, changed utterly."

A motion is also being deliberated by Quebec Superior Court Sophie Bourque on whether revelations Magnotta made to researchers conducting a 2007 study on male and female escorts and their clients should be used in the murder case against him.

Montreal police got a warrant to seize the audio recording and 68-page transcript of the interview June 22 after Adam McLeod, who interviewed Magnotta for the study Sex Work and Intimacy: Escorts and Their Clients, recognized his photo in the newspaper and notified police at the end of May.

Lawyers for the criminologists argue that participants were assured confidentiality and if that is breached, no one will take part in studies on sensitive topics again.

The crown prosecutor suggested Bourque view the seized material — which is under seal — in private, then decide whether the administration of justice outweighs the interest of confidentiality.